1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information retrieval. More specifically, the present invention relates to a client/server model for information retrieval which includes the receipt of a plurality of information organized by profile and topic in a first markup language, and the parsing of the plurality of information into portions of information in a second markup language, including anchors referencing each of the portions of information to allow hypertext viewing and accessing.
2. Background Information
The development of computerized information resources, such as the Internet, and various on-line services, such as Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy, and other services, has led to a proliferation of electronically-available information. In fact, this electronic information is increasingly displacing more conventional means of information transmission, such as newspapers, magazines, and even, television. The primary issue in all of these resources is filtering the vast amount of information which is available in order that a user obtain that information which is of interest to him.
Currently, a user who subscribes to one of the above-services, or uses the Internet, in some circumstances, manually scans through the various information resources in order to obtain articles, postings, or other files which are of interest. Typically, the user manually scans in areas or sources of interest (publications, USENET Newsgroups, fora, or other areas classified by topic) to find topic areas which may be of interest to the user. The user then retrieves articles or files which have subject headings, for example, matching those which the user wishes to read. For example, in USENET newsgroups on the Internet postings frequently have relevant subject headings to permit manual scanning. Article headings in newspapers/magazines serve similar functions. Thus, if the user does not wish to view those stories with products for sale, then he simply ignores those postings having the term "For Sale" in the subject heading. Finally, as a last level of filtering, the user can read the stories which have been filtered by topic, and subject heading, and if anytime during the viewing of the story the user wishes to ignore the rest of the article, he can stop reading it and simply discard the story. If desired, the user can download the remaining stories in any number of prior ways, for off-line viewing.
As is clearly evident, this manual scanning process which a user must engage in is very time-consuming. To some extent, news is already filtered for readers. Those that subscribe to certain magazines/newspapers, or view certain television networks, already have the vast base of electronically-available information (e.g. wire services) filtered for them. However, this "filtering" is performed on a large-scale basis, for a wide audience. The tailoring of specific stories of interest to particular users has not been performed. Thus, a need has arisen to automatically sort through the large variety of electronic sources in order to generate a subset of the stories available in electronic form which is tailored to a user's specific interests is desired.
Other services have recently become available. Some allow the retrieval of information via facsimile or other means, based upon user-specified parameters. Certain commercial services now provide a facsimile service to retrieve articles of interest based upon predefined profiles. These profiles include those grouped by company or by subject area. The articles of interest are retrieved using standard prior art techniques (e.g. boolean search terms). These services do not to a large extent, however, provide the information in digital form (e.g. on a user-interface display), nor do they allow the browsing of information which is retrieved from these sources.
Thus, the prior art of obtaining information from various sources suffers from several shortcomings.